New keyboard configuration handling

Note that the changes I describe here are currently available in Fedora rawhide, but I expect they will be available soon in a similar form both in X.Org git and in other distributions.

We finally closed the last big chapter in the evdev input driver transition - the handling of device grabs (in the kernel). As described previously, evdev used to put a kernel grab on the device so no-one else could open the same device. This avoided duplicate events but the grab hindered other programs that needed access to the device too: lirc, rfkill, HAL and others.
The need for the grab was removed with quite a simple patch. However, this isn't the whole story, and another patch changes server's default behaviour.

So here's the rundown how it may affect you:

In short, evdev and kbd/mouse are mutually exclusive as they produce duplicate events if both are active. In any configuration where both are specified, kbd/mouse are ignored.


If you don't have an xorg.conf, your devices were hotplugged through HAL. Nothing changes for you.

If you have an xorg.conf with input devices using mouse or kbd as driver, they are now ignored.
Effectively nothing changes though: due to the evdev grab these mouse/kbd devices were previously "mute", i.e. the would never send events anyway. You might as well remove the respective sections from your xorg.conf. However, having the devices in your xorg.conf provided a fallback: if HAL was not working, kbd/mouse would pick up the slack. This fallback is gone.

If you disable AllowEmptyInput, AutoAddDevices or AutoEnableDevices, then you get the traditional X server behaviour:

1. Devices referenced in the ServerLayout are available in the server, or if none are specified,


2. The first pointer or keyboard device in the xorg.conf become available in the server, or if none are specified,


3. The standard configs become available (/dev/console and /dev/input/mice).

Disabling AllowEmptyInput is discouraged and should not be necessary on virtually all standard desktop systems.

Update: If you are using evdev 2.1 and you only disable AllowEmptyInput, the devices will still be added and you will get duplicate events (key repeat handling will then make each key press emit three characters). AEI defaults to (AutoAddDevices && AutoEnableDevices), so if you want to disable HAL, the best option is to set AutoAddDevices to "off".